Have mystics throughout history always been deluded?

[Federico del pueblo]

You know how most of the ancient (or even current) tribes, but also civilizations like the Maya, Inka or Egypts had their own type of spirituality and also some mystics or shamans etc. and as far as I know many of them had access to very potent psychedelics too.

All of these folks used to believe in a whole array of different gods and deities and spirits, like a god of the sun, the god of wine etc.

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's.

But then I'm wondering, if these folks had actual mystics wouldn't you assume that these guys had the ability to access very heightened states of consciousness, have transcendental, spiritual experiences, which would have enabled them to make realizations about the nature of reality and thus see through the illusion of all of their made gods and deities?

Or do you think I'm expecting too much of them here and their spiritual experiences would rather deepen their already existing beliefs about deities/gods/spirits etc.?

[Thought Art]

I don’t know 

 

But, I do think Gods and Deities were more archetypal than literal

[Federico del pueblo]

2 minutes ago, Thought Art said:

I don’t know 

 

But, I do think Gods and Deities were more archetypal than literal

So what does one actually believe when a deity is perceived as archetypal? Is like "yeah we just like the image/idea of a god of X, but we don't really think it's actual"?

[Yarco]

They might all be tapping into the ultimate truth, but seeing it through the worldview and framework of the time in which they lived.

Same as scientists a couple hundred years ago. Sometimes they got the answer right by sheer luck, but their rationale behind it was wrong in bizarre ways. Other times they get stuff totally wrong that is obvious to us today in retrospect.

It's easy to think that we're at the pinnacle and peak of understanding. In some ways we are compared to the vast majority who came before us, but we're also most likely incredibly ignorant on an infinite timescale.

Chances that even Leo has the ultimate truth are near-zero, as demonstrated by the fact that he continues to have even deeper and more profound awakenings.

 

[Loba]

Well, in my personal lived experience, reality is made up of multiple layers of consciousness, and within these different layers, you find all sorts of various spiritual wildlife, natural energies flowing through you, even spirits, "deities" -  which are those who oversee the laws that govern our reality and other realities.  It isn't as straightforward as just, "All is me, I am God", there are other facets to consciousness.  The shaman/mystic sees into these states while going through ecstatic trances.  It is Felt, more than Seen with your eyes, but sometimes a person can See them as well.  You Will feel it in your heart and will be granted a large portion of information in a short period of time.

The problem isn't that these mystics were deluded, the problem is that people have forgotten the underlying structures and natural forces that come together to help create our consensus reality.  These beings generally have no shape, and are strung together using allegory and metaphor to try and explain their natures.  If such things were not factual, if people did not find these things while in higher states of being, then they would not be a reoccurring feature across almost every culture, with the exception of modern man, who is completely blind to these forces anyways.

It is the hubris of human beings to think they can dawn a robe of "Godliness", take on a narrow and blind spiritual path that excludes the divine, and call themselves a creature made in the image of God.  That isn't how it works.  Sure, you can have an experience into the nature of that, but to be able to do anything with it, to have any merit at all, this takes practice, work and you have to be considered a "safe vessel" to harbor the creative intelligence that comes with this.  Otherwise, you will just be trapped with a few awakenings, consider this the end point, and not have any real power or agency.  And many people fall into this trap.

The difference between modern man and ancient man, is that ancient man was connected to nature and to his death in a real way, that he had to face every day.  This brings to you things within reality that you don't need to understand if you live in comfort.

Such things are generally secrets.  If they want you to know about them, they will make sure you know.  If they don't, you won't get very far with it, because to know these things is to change destiny.  It is, almost in some sense, better to not believe, than to be inundated with ancient knowledge, because once you have it - you have a responsibility to it.  This is one reason why schools who teach people how to obtain this secret knowledge do so in private, and one reason why shamans and mystics are chosen from beyond - they have the natural capacity to make something of this, most people can barely even comprehend it, let alone follow it, let alone build anything from it. 

There is so much "out there", it would, could, drive a human being mad just to stare into it.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Loba

[Leo Gura]

35 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's

Humans always invent conceptual constructs to make sense of reality. You're still doing it today.

Even nonduality and science does this.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Federico del pueblo]

@Loba oh, that was interesting.

I can still be struggling a bit with what is real vs what is "imaginary".

So there is this consensus material reality that we all know.

Nobody would have a debate with me about whether the table in front of me is real or not. If I show them a photo of the table they'll agree it is real.

But if I told them that I know some spirit that keeps visiting me, then everyone would doubt it and challenge me in all kinds of ways.

I can see how for them something is not real (or imaginary or false) if they can't see any evidence of it, but that doesn't make a thing unreal per se.

But then again you could have someone who makes claims that can't be justified in any way, like "in the center of earth there is some huge red dragon living, that can spit fire etc." and it's a problem because the people who have legitimate experiences with certain spiritual entities could be lumped together with these people who make false claims.

Anyway, so you've had experiences with spirits or entities of any kind?

[Loba]

9 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

I can still be struggling a bit with what is real vs what is "imaginary".

Same, this takes years of practice - of determining what is genuine spiritual phenomenon and what is a product of the mind.
One thing that helps me determine the two is the location of the insight - if it comes in through my chest - my heart, and there is a lot of information into the underlying nature of something that brings me a sense of resolution, I take it as truth.  If it comes in through the mind, through thought and reflection, then I take it as an idea or if, I go too far with it, it will become a delusion.

10 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But if I told them that I know some spirit that keeps visiting me, then everyone would doubt it and challenge me in all kinds of ways.

And that's okay, too.  It's good for people to challenge these kinds of things because they are not seen by most.  I mean, anyone can make any claim, and you do have to question what people say.  A healthy thing to do for sure. 
A good way of determining who is authentic and who isn't is a few different ways - one, the authentic person will continue with their work regardless of what other people say, two, the authentic person will come to some sort of resolution about something that should indicate a higher force is working through them.  You will see things like allegory, metaphor, and generally the energy that they are working with should be malleable - there should be a give and take with communication, just like with people.  It won't be a fixed state.

A way to tell if someone is fake/mentally ill is if they are reaching out to people to give them accolades or praise for their claims.  They want to be seen with the image of the shaman/mystic - a common thing in spiritual circles, or if mentally ill, they will have insight that brings them nowhere, they end up coming apart at the seams and can't put themselves together again.  Although, at times this can also be someone in the throws of shamanic sickness, or there could be a psychic attack on the person - a good way to tell if they are genuine is if they are integrating concepts of interconnectedness, love, basically coming to some sort of resolution within themselves.
Mental illness/shamanism can be very tricky to separate because we have many people in the modern world who would be shamans, but there is no training to get them there and their gifts are lumped as mental illness, however, many people with mental illness also claim this title, and some have a mixture of both.  You kind of just have to use your intuition.
Another way to tell if someone is not "real" - is they affix an image onto the divine.  The divine has no image that you can really use, all images are placeholders.  When someone attaches to a divine being a list of set traits, or a picture or anything like this, and are not able to work with the underlying energy, then they are communicating with their own thought processes and nothing more.  Which can also be a spiritual tool, if they know they are doing this - but many get the two confused, this happens a lot when "fake shamans" try to teach other people how to do journeys.  They are basically just teaching them active imagination and other techniques, but are not connecting to anything genuine.
Generally, over time, with real spirit communication - the spirit or deity will offer more and more detail into who they are - and the person should be able to come up with dozens of different ways of explaining what they are dealing with.  It won't look like a tumblr grocery list.  It will look more like a personal cosmology come to life, that has a general forward moving trajectory.  

19 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But then again you could have someone who makes claims that can't be justified in any way, like "in the center of earth there is some huge red dragon living, that can spit fire etc." and it's a problem because the people who have legitimate experiences with certain spiritual entities could be lumped together with these people who make false claims.

True, and it is up to the person who encounters such people to be able to judge the true ones from the false ones.  I don't mind being lumped into the same category to be honest.  If someone doesn't believe in this stuff, or they think I am crazy - which sometimes I can be - that's okay.  It isn't completely up to me to change their mind.  From the things that I have seen, it is probably a safer position for a person to discredit me, than to see what I see. 

27 minutes ago, Federico del pueblo said:

Anyway, so you've had experiences with spirits or entities of any kind?

Yes, often and many.  They come in through a few different ways.  The first way was through a pathway that was seared into my mind that I continue to follow with each trance state that I go into.
I was opened to them in late 2016 by God's energy coming through, after a prolonged period of sickness and facing death.

So, I use a few different techniques to bring them to me - I face my death head on, while I inquire into my psychology to remove any blocks that prevent me from getting into this death state - it is called "hollow bone", and I go into a trance that feels very pleasant and I can maintain it for about 4-7 hours - with music.  Sometimes a certain song, or certain psychological "unraveling" will bring to me something from the other side.

Another way, is that I can actively See manifestation and energy in the outer environment, and when I do - I get a "ping" in my heart area that gives me a lot of information within a fraction of a second.  It is almost like Seeing and feeling an electromagnetic wave of consciousness being manifested in the outer environment.  These are portals, or sometimes the entity itself pushing itself through to create as much physicality as it can in the real world.

When identifying these beings - they don't come in right away and say "I am this *insert name here*" - it comes in dribs and drabs of information into the nature of the being.  Because these intelligences require that you understand certain aspects of how the other side works, they prep you with information pertaining to how that ecosystem is set up - once your mind is able to put together what you are dealing with, they will give you more information into what they are.  It's a process of opening your mind and psychology to something that is almost alien in nature, and so you need to change the wiring of your system to allow them to come through.  This training period takes years, sometimes decades.

It doesn't feel like I am dealing with like, a certain God from a certain religion, it feels more like many religions have used various methods of explaining these things in their own way, but that these beings come with many names.  What it feels like is an intelligent Will, combined with the feedback loops that contain evolutionary processes, followed by a library that holds records comingled with a sense of timelessness, that you step outside of time itself - you are no longer moving on the same track anymore, and they are there - just an onion peel away from it all.

They don't let every human know about them, or come to understand their nature, the reason for this is some humans simply can't due to incompatibility, or they don't have the time in their life - but could have been a candidate, or these beings don't see them as someone who will do right by the information given.  When they give you this information, it doesn't just unlock your discovery into them, but also into how the universe is structured, how to manifest certain things, how things will play out for mankind, and if a person gets too far up and takes that for granted, this can cause a lot of problems.  To know these things is like to have a superpowered siddhi, that lets you play with the wires underneath it all.  And of course, reality can't just let anyone do this.  That isn't safe.  This is why, even for people who don't believe in these things - when they obtain Godly status, they must do it through purification and learning to love and to be selfless. 
 

[Carl-Richard]

10 hours ago, Federico del pueblo said:

All of these folks used to believe in a whole array of different gods and deities and spirits, like a god of the sun, the god of wine etc.

But I guess all of this is just nonsense thought up by humans who needed to make sense of their existence and their environment and thus they came up with these god's.

These were tools of cognition; ways of categorizing and making sense of reality, which increases the fluidity of processing. It is what we today call rationality and science in their nascent forms. They have the same identical function — as useful fictions — and they're not any more delusional than knowing how to read or write.

 

10 hours ago, Federico del pueblo said:

But then I'm wondering, if these folks had actual mystics wouldn't you assume that these guys had the ability to access very heightened states of consciousness, have transcendental, spiritual experiences, which would have enabled them to make realizations about the nature of reality and thus see through the illusion of all of their made gods and deities?

Or do you think I'm expecting too much of them here and their spiritual experiences would rather deepen their already existing beliefs about deities/gods/spirits etc.?

Ken Wilber aces this distinction by calling it "Waking Up" vs. "Growing Up". Even if you have deep mystical experiences, you're still very much stuck with the cognitive machinery of your culture. Awakening does not automatically grant things like rationality or universal human rights. Those are cognitively complex phenomena which require millenia of cultural evolution, and they must be learnt from an early age. You don't pull that stuff from the sky. Even the Socratics who "invented" Western thinking were deeply influenced by the gradual cultural evolution of their society. Your true nature is beyond culture, beyond cognition.

[Vibroverse]

If you think about it, even the concepts that we now are creating, kinda, are mystical things. I mean, we are observing the patterns of nature, and then we are ascribing a causal explanation to it. We create symbols and concepts to explain what the world is, and if you think about it, the thunder being created by the anger of Zeus is another explanation of what that natural phenomenon exists. 

You can even say that, we have just become more abstract in the creation of concepts in our modern scientific and philosophical discourse. We are creating imaginary "things", aka concepts in a more abstracted way, while, in the mythological explanations, you, in a sense, find a more concrete and storified version of those concepts. 

You know, I mean, we are creating concepts that, we believe, explain why things are the way they are, and all those concepts, ultimately, are a product of the human mind, they are abstractions and storifications of the human mind where we produce "something" that actually is not there. 

 

[Federico del pueblo]

@Loba oh damn, you've gone very far down into this rabbit hole. That truly sounds like many years of practice!

So thanks for your detailed post, it's very insightful!

 

5 hours ago, Vibroverse said:

If you think about it, even the concepts that we now are creating, kinda, are mystical things. I mean, we are observing the patterns of nature, and then we are ascribing a causal explanation to it. We create symbols and concepts to explain what the world is, and if you think about it, the thunder being created by the anger of Zeus is another explanation of what that natural phenomenon exists. 

You can even say that, we have just become more abstract in the creation of concepts in our modern scientific and philosophical discourse. We are creating imaginary "things", aka concepts in a more abstracted way, while, in the mythological explanations, you, in a sense, find a more concrete and storified version of those concepts. 

You know, I mean, we are creating concepts that, we believe, explain why things are the way they are, and all those concepts, ultimately, are a product of the human mind, they are abstractions and storifications of the human mind where we produce "something" that actually is not there. 

 

Are you here coming from this realization of "everything is imaginary", as in even if we understand the laws of nature and all the phenomena in painstaking detail in the relative sense, it's all still imaginary and therefore just like an projection of our mind?

[Vibroverse]

1 hour ago, Federico del pueblo said:

@Loba oh damn, you've gone very far down into this rabbit hole. That truly sounds like many years of practice!

So thanks for your detailed post, it's very insightful!

 

Are you here coming from this realization of "everything is imaginary", as in even if we understand the laws of nature and all the phenomena in painstaking detail in the relative sense, it's all still imaginary and therefore just like an projection of our mind?

What I'm saying is, science is about evolution. We are evolving in our concepts and understandings of how reality works. And future generations will probably make fun of how we are trying to make sense of reality in the way that we are making fun of how the ancient civilizations were trying to make sense of reality. 

 

[Federico del pueblo]

@Vibroverse ok, got it. ?

[RMQualtrough]

I've seen Hindu deities on heavy DMT trips. It's actually quite funny in hindsight, that I've been so high I'm literally talking to Krishna. LMFAO. That's like, hilarious. I'm not even Indian. And this was before I even knew about panpsychism let alone anything beyond that.

Very strange.

I feel maybe some of the religious ideas are just tripping then writing it down as some kind of revelation.

[Carl-Richard]

26 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

And this was before I even knew about panpsychism let alone anything beyond that.

Panpsychism?  You mean idealism?

[RMQualtrough]

1 hour ago, Carl-Richard said:

Panpsychism?  You mean idealism?

Nah, panpsychisn is the first thing that popped up at the time. Or Vedanta? But def one of the first things I come across seatching monist religion.

[Carl-Richard]

29 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

Nah, panpsychisn is the first thing that popped up at the time. Or Vedanta? But def one of the first things I come across seatching monist religion.

When I hear panpsychism, I'm thinking about constitutive micropsychism, the new hip thing that some scientists are onto, which says that all elementary particles in physics have their own private consciousness. Constitutive micropsychism is not monistic. It's atomistic.

Edited October 12, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Oeaohoo]

On 11/10/2022 at 0:20 PM, Carl-Richard said:

These were tools of cognition; ways of categorizing and making sense of reality, which increases the fluidity of processing. It is what we today call rationality and science in their nascent forms. They have the same identical function — as useful fictions — and they're not any more delusional than knowing how to read or write.

This is a very utilitarian explanation. Humans do things for so many other reasons than simply making sense of the world. As an example, even assuming that such things don’t exist, people may have worshipped and made offerings to deities simply as an expression of gratitude for their existence. This has nothing to do with cognition! It also overlooks the fact that, for the ancients and even up to the Renaissance, everything in nature was a symbol of a supernatural reality. For example, the Sun was worshipped in many ancient cultures as a permanent reminder of the eternal and undying Truth (Sol Invictus), the purity and incorruptibility of pure Consciousness (like Gold which does not rust), the virtues that characterised Regal nobility (above all, solitary and supreme leadership), and even of the life-giving principle and the male seed (which fructifies the Earth like a man impregnates a woman). These symbolical relationships aren’t really useful for anything, except pointing to the perfectly ordered and “as above, so below” nature of existence.

[Carl-Richard]

@Oeaohoo

Sure. I was only challenging the frame of calling it "nonsense". It was very much "sense"

[Ramu]

@RMQualtrough Nonduality has ZERO to do with religion